Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [2]
12. The threshold of horror: Poison gas
SIX - Japan: The Atomic Bombs and War’s End
1. Japan in retreat
2. Preparing to fight the invaders
3. Preparing to drop Little Boy
4. Mission No. 13
5. The bombed city
6. The bombed people
7. Patterns of response
8. The shock waves from the bomb
9. Soviet entry and the bombing of Nagasaki
10. The Big Six debates
11. Explaining Japan’s surrender
12. Assessing the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
13. ‘Nothing, Nothing’: Memories of Hiroshima
SEVEN - The Soviet Union: The Bomb and the Cold War
1. The American response
2. The early Soviet nuclear program
3. The Soviets’ atomic spies
4. Stalin decides to build the bomb
5. The bomb and the onset of the Cold War
6. Call/response: Developing the ‘super’
7. The arms race and nuclear diversity
8. The limits of atomic weapons: The Cuban missile crisis
EIGHT - The World’s Bomb
1. Great Britain
2. The French atomic bomb
3. Israel: Security and status
4. South Africa: To the nuclear brink and back
5. China: The people’s bomb
6. India: Status, religion, and masculinity
7. The critics of nuclear weapons
Epilogue: Nightmares and Hopes
Notes
introduction: the world’s bomb
chapter one: the world’s atom
chapter two: Great Britain: Refugees, air power, and the possibility of the bomb
chapter four: the United States I
chapter five: the united states II
chapter six: Japan: the atomic bombs and war's end
chapter seven: the Soviet Union: the bomb and the cold war
chapter eight: the world's bomb
epilogue
Bibliographical Essay
Credits
Index
Plates
1.
Ernest Rutherford: A New Zealander who came to the United Kingdom in 1895, Rutherford was one of the pioneers of modern nuclear physics
2.
Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, in their laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute outside Berlin, 1938
3.
Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Isidor Rabi: Three physicists who played important roles in the development of the first nuclear weapons
4.
A US government propaganda poster, “Lookout Monks!”: Throughout the war, the British and American governments encouraged citizens to imagine the destruction of Germany and Japan by bombers
5.
Johann Strasse, central Dresden, 1945: American and British air forces bombed the German city of Dresden on the night of 14—15 February, 1945
6.
Yoshio Nishina’s cyclotron, built at Tokyo’s Riken Laboratory
7.
Leslie Groves andJ. Robert Oppenheimer: Groves was made a general and put in charge of the top-secret Manhattan Project in September 1942
8.
The Americans destroy a German “uranium burner”
9.
The Japanese emperor, Hirohito, walks through Tokyo neighborhoods wrecked by American bombs
10.
Unloading the plutonium core of the Trinity test gadget, July 1945
11.
The “Big Three” at Potsdam, July 1945: The Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin, US President Harry S. Truman, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill came together at Potsdam
12.
Ruined Hiroshima: The atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy” struck near the heart of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945
13.
The bombed, I: The living in Hiroshima sought shelter where they could find it
14.
The bombed, 2: A family at a makeshift hospital ward
15.
Standing at attention: A boy stands erect, having done his duty by bringing his dead brother to a cremation ground
16.
No handshake for a hated enemy: The Americans ordered the Japanese to send a surrender delegation to Manila
17.
Yuli Khariton and Igor Kurchatov: The two physicists most responsible for the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb program in the 1940s
18.
The Indian reactor at Trombay: The CIRUS reactor, built with Canadian help and supplied with moderating heavy water by the United States, came online in I960
Introduction
The World’s Bomb
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945, seems in many ways an event characterized by clarity and even simplicity. From a clear blue sky on a radiantly hot summer morning came a single American B-29 bomber (warily flanked by two observation planes), carrying a single bomb. The